Editing Meta Tags Meta tags are hidden tags that are located in the head section of an HTML page. <html> Almost all WYSIWYG web page editors insert meta tags into a new document. If you open a new web page with Microsoft FrontPage then this is what you see if you examine the HTML (meta tags are highlighted). <html> The only familiar tag is probably the title tag. You should notice that the meta description and keyword tags as discussed in meta tags explained are completely missing. If you save the web page Frontage will prompt for a title but nothing else. It is possible to edit the meta tags by right clicking the page and selecting page properties. This is not however obvious and you must supply the meta tag names yourself. This behaviour is not peculiar to FrontPage. None of the Web Page editors that I have tried handle meta tags well. Therefore, I always hand edit the HTML to change the Meta Tags. Web Page Templates and Meta Tags All web designers use a website template and all web pages are built using this template. Therefore the first thing I do is to edit the template to contain the Meta tags I want. Important Note: Because the template will be used to create other web pages it is important that it is valid HTML or XHTML. Therefore I would recommend that you get it validated.-validator.w3.org Here is the template for this site showing the Meta Tags. <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> You should notice that the title, description and Keyword tags are present. Other tags are also present shown highlighted in green. The meta tags highlighted in green will be the same for each page and require no further editing. The Meta tags shown highlighted in yellow must be changed for each web page. The most common mistake people make with Meta Tags is making them the same on each page. Every web page should have it's own title, description and keywords. Therefore when making new web pages I open the template enter the content as normal and save it using a new file name. Once finished my last job is to view the HTML source and edit the meta Title, description and keyword tags. Note: Most web page editors don't do spell checking when in HTML or view source mode so you need to be careful with your spelling.
<head>
..............Meta tags go here
</head>
<body>
........Visible Page Content goes here
</body>
</html>
<head>
<meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft FrontPage 5.0">
<meta name="ProgId" content="FrontPage.Editor.Document">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
<title>New Page 2</title>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Making a Website</TITLE>
<META Name="Description" Content="Making a Website ">
<META Name="Keywords" Content="Making a Website ">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
<style>
@import url(makingwebsite.css);
</style>
</HEAD>
Sunday, December 23, 2007
Editing Meta Tags
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